MUSIC SCENE : New album, tour for Peter Mulvey

Friday

Apr 4, 2014 at 6:00 AM

Milwaukee native Peter Mulvey has nurtured an admirable career as an intelligent songwriter, whose style tended toward folk with a bit of a bluesy streak. He will be performing Saturday at the South Shore Folk Music Club's Beal House in Kingston.

By Jay N. MillerFor The Patriot Ledger

Milwaukee native Peter Mulvey has nurtured an admirable career as an intelligent songwriter, whose style tended toward folk with a bit of a bluesy streak. But for his first new album in five years, coming off a personal breakup, Mulvey wanted to change things up.

His solution was to enlist California rocker Chuck Prophet as producer. Since Prophet’s own rock ’n’ roll resembles Tom Petty’s melodic flow with Warren Zevon’s lyrical bite, the resulting album, “Silver Ladder,” which was released on Signature Sounds, is Mulvey’s most rock-oriented effort yet.

Mulvey will be performing Saturday at the South Shore Folk Music Club’s Beal House in Kingston. He’ll also be playing at Club Passim in Harvard Square on Sunday and Monday nights.

Mulvey is just completing a European tour, so we conducted an interview by email while he was in London. An interesting detail is that Mulvey, 44, admits he didn’t really know Chuck Prophet that well before enlisting him for this project, so we began there.

Q: It sounds like you didn’t really know Chuck Prophet too well before this, but you must have heard his music, and seen him perform. Obviously he’s seen as more of a rocker than you have been, so what made you feel he was the man to bring out the side of Peter Mulvey you wanted to present? How much convincing did you have to do with Chuck?

A: I didn’t have to do any convincing. I’d seen him just once, in Tampa, when I opened a show for him. I loved what he did, it blew my mind. I reached out and he said yes within four hours.

It was a blast working with him, I needed a shot in the arm, or more properly a gale-force hurricane to clear the decks.”

Support group

When Mulvey arrived at the studio, Prophet had gathered a potent band to back him. Along with Prophet himself on guitar and some harmony vocals, the group included James DePrato, lead guitarist from Prophet’s band; drummer David Kemper, who’s played with Bob Dylan; Nickel Creek’s Sara Watkins on vocals and violin; and Tom Freund, from Ben Harper’s band, on upright bass.

Going over some of the demos of Mulvey’s new songs, Prophet liked “Where Did You Go?” which Mulvey had written with David Goodrich and lyricist Barry Rothman for vastly underrated Boston rock ’n’ soul singer Anita Suhanin. As Prophet and Mulvey discussed that song, they decided to bring Suhanin in to do the tune as a duet with Mulvey.

Q: You also let Chuck put together a studio band for this new album. Did you have any trepidation about that? Did you give him any guidelines, or was he simply working off of your demos and the intentions you’d conveyed to him?

A: I trusted him, but I also trust music. I’ve been writing songs for 25 years, and I’ve tried to really get inside certain song forms. Once you’ve done that, and you’re making music with guys who’ve been swimming in the same waters for decades, it all becomes natural. I think you could probably do it without a common spoken language, music’s that powerful.

Local boy

Mulvey, who began playing while attending Marquette University, moved to Boston shortly after graduation and is often seen in these parts as a Boston-Cambridge performer.

Along with his own solo albums, he has also appeared on several more CDs as a featured performer among round-robin collaborations, so he is a prime performer on about 15 albums in all.

Many of those works used different arrangements and band formats, and Mulvey usually plays live as an acoustic performer, either as a solo act or in small formats like a duo or trio. How will some of the new songs, rockers like “Back in the Wind” or “Sympathies,” translate to coffeehouse gigs?

Q: Of course you’ve used studio musicians on previous albums, so it’s a situation you’re somewhat familiar with. But, how do the studio arrangements, the music on the new record in other words, translate to your own performances? Or, how do you adjust the full band treatments to your presumably solo shows?

A: I play solo, with bands, and duo, all the time. For me, a song is not an object, like a painting or a sculpture. It’s a territory. Even when I play solo, I improvise, try to find my way through the territory that is the song. So it’s always new, and each version is a new creation anyhow.

Writing with friends

Mulvey is the kind of songwriter who’s always happy to collaborate, so there are quite a few co-writes among the new material. Matt Lorenz of the band Rusty Belle wrote “Remember the Milkman” with him, while Milwaukee roots-rocker Paul Cebar co-wrote “Back in the Wind” with Mulvey.

Prophet encouraged the singer to turn the spacey jam “Copenhagen Airport” into a full-fledged song, and the resultant epic is a delectable left turn for Mulvey. (The song’s entire lyric, which evokes Prophet’s kind of skewed perspective, is simply the couplet “Sweet Bearded Jesus, the women in the Copenhagen Airport are so good looking! And not one of them is going to London.”)

Q: You’ve got some cool co-writes on this album, and of course you’ve appeared on some collaborative album projects in the past. Does writing with other people often make things easier, or help clarify your ideas? What kind of co-writers do you tend to seek?

A: Co-writing is wonderful. When you’re writing alone, you’re tempted to ask the fatal question “What do I have to say?” and of course you have nothing to say. It’s all been said, better, by writers who are now topsoil. Once I let go and realized I had nothing to say, my writing improved immediately. And co-writing is great because all you’re really asking is, “What works between us? – which is a way more useful question.

CD highlight

The song with Suhanin is somewhat of a departure, since typically Mulvey isn’t thought of as someone who writes specifically for other people, but “Where Did You Go?” is a certainly a highlight on the new CD.

Q: The Anita Suhanin duet is very potent. Do you do much writing specifically for other folks, and is that a bit of a switch from writing tunes you intend to sing?

A: David Goodrich started that song. We were going into the studio to make Anita’s record (it’ll be out someday) and wanted a song just for her. He and I wrestled it into some shape but couldn’t get a lyric. And then Barry Rothman came in and wrote the whole lyric. It’s crazy; that’s his first song. Home run on the first at-bat. As far as who sings it, a song is a song is a song. Nick Lowe says when he has a new batch, he rents a hall in his town in England and gets on the empty stage and sings to the empty house “until the songs feel like covers.” That’s the spirit. Songs are meant to be out there, floating around, these weird presences that we call upon, or that call upon us.